MR. [DAVID] GREGORY: So what are the biggest challenges he faces now in Afghanistan?
MR. [TOM] RICKS: Well, I think the first thing is to recognize that it’s not really a war in Afghanistan, it’s a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As a friend of mine said, it’s hard to win a war in Afghanistan when the enemy wants to fight it in the next country over, Pakistan.
MR. GREGORY: Right. And that’s the Taliban fighting and winning battles in Pakistan. This is where we went to war to take them out of power.
MR. RICKS: And that’s very scary. And our supply lines through Pakistan are being challenged. Bridges are being blown up, American convoys are being attacked. So I think the first thing that Obama will do is begin to look at it as an Afghan-Pakistan war, in which Pakistan is really the more important factor. We could lose in Afghanistan. It would be unhappy, but not, you know, terrible for us. If you lose Pakistan, you end up having the mujahideen, Islamic extremists, with nuclear weapons. And that was a major al-Qaeda goal that we really do not want to see happen. I don’t think that Newsweek got it quite right the other day when they referred to Afghanistan as potentially Obama’s Vietnam. I think potentially Obama’s Vietnam is Pakistan.
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